Details

Date Published

Date Built

CPU Clock Rate

CPU Temperature While Idle

27.0° C

CPU Temperature Under Load

51.0° C

GPU Core Clock Rate

1.25GHz

GPU Effective Memory Clock Rate

6.1GHz

GPU Temperature While Idle

24.0° C

GPU Temperature Under Load

55.0° C

Description

Hello again builders! Here is another build that I have done for a friend of mine. He is a big Starcraft 2 and League of Legends gamer. So keep in mind that this is designed around those two games, with of course room to expand. The core budget for this was in the $700-800 range. He gave the okay to go upwards of $900, but I didn’t feel that it was necessary. After a few finishing touches this is the final product.

Main goals:

Perform well in Starcraft 2 and League of Legends

Have a red/black color theme with case lighting

Maintain quiet operation during extensive gaming sessions

PARTS:

CPU:

Starcraft 2 is very CPU bound. That being said I instantly leaned on the Intel side. I felt that the per-core performance was going to be the ticket. The user is a novice and has no intent to overclock so I went with the best CPU I could fit into the budget. The 4670 made sense.

COOLER:

I know that an aftermarket cooler is not necessary for a locked CPU. I do however, like to give the end user lots of options; it is their build in the end. I ran through the pros of having an aftermarket cooler and he liked the idea. The only con is price. I showed him the 212 EVO and a few other budget coolers, but he really liked the look of the RR-T612. I can’t say I blame him! The chrome look is really appealing in the side window, it’s absolutely silent, and temps are very low. I think that due to the CPU intensity of SC2 that the cooler is warranted.

MOTHERBOARD:

I went with Gigabyte again. This is one of the only boards in the price range that isn’t blue, gold, or ASRock. Unfortunately I received the Rev 2.0 version of the board. I was a little sad that they changed the heatsink design so drastically, but I’ll live. The other notable change is was the fan header on the right from a 4 pin to a 3 pin. The B85 chipset is often overlooked I think. If you don’t need RAID or SLi then it’s a really viable choice. While it’s nothing to brag about, it gets the job done.

MEMORY:

Corsair makes very high quality RAM. I ran a few different varieties by the user and this is the one he chose. Standard 1600mhz, CAS 9. Nothing special, but they fit the color theme nicely. I haven’t used Vengeance RAM since “The Quiet Night” and had forgotten just how large these dimms are!

STORAGE:

The Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB is probably the most popular drive among PC users and I’ve used it several times before. I was happy to get it on sale for $50 as well!

GPU:

The 750 Ti is a new card from Nvidia and I was happy to get the chance to try it out. While not being a powerhouse card, it performs very well for a game that came out in 2010 and a MOBA. I really like the new core architecture on this card allowing for very low wattage usage and temps, while allowing for some insanely high overclocks. Check for benchmarks below.

The card’s shroud was easily removed with just a few small screws holding it on. I used vinyl dye to paint the shroud. It works really well and goes on very thin. I used the guide from Tek Syndicate.

CASE:

This case was FREE. I wouldn’t have chosen this case if my life depended on it, but it’s what I had to work with. It comes with little to no cable routing options. I got out the power tools and cut out a few holes to route cables around the back. All I can say is that I’m glad cases are made the way they are today! The user really wanted lights so I went with the NZXT Hue again. It’s very easy to install and has as many colors as anyone might need.

PSU:

The Rosewill name may have a few queasy in their seats, but fear not, the Capstone is a very high quality unit. The semi-modularity was much needed in this case and a PCI-E 6+2 pin cable is not permanent, since the 750 Ti doesn’t need a power connector that just removed one cable. With two Enermax Silence Series PWM fans I had from another project, I removed the need for molex. Top all of that off with plenty of wattage and Gold efficiency and you’ve got yourself an excellent PSU option. I added a couple red Silverstone extensions to really make the color scheme shine.

CONCLUSION:

Coming from an aging laptop my friend is very pleased with his new machine. He is able to play these games on something other than the minimum settings for a change. I really enjoyed building this for him even though it required a little more work than the usual. I tried my damnedest to make the cable management work. Overall I’m very pleased with the outcome and so is he!

Comments
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I love the 750 Ti. Most people on this site are going to go with something more powerful anyways so I think they dismiss it out of hand, but for the price and power draw the card is in a league all of its own. If you could scale the compute performance directly with power draw it would smash every card on the market by a long shot.

Great part choices and pictures! Also I love the little bit of modding you did too!

Thank you! It wasn't a ton of work, just enough to make it all work the way I wanted.

The 750 Ti is a great card to turn a pre-built into a decent gaming machine. Especially if you play something like a MOBA or WoW.

The camera I used is several years old now, but it still takes great pictures. I would look on craigslist or ebay at some older models of the new stuff. This is the Canon Rebel T2i. I think they are on the T5i now? Should be able to find a deal somewhere!

This isn't too far from my build The Dark Horse. Which is a very worthy 1080p gaming machine. While it isn't going to max out every game available, you will be playing most games at high and ultra. Games like Crysis 3 make some powerful computers weep.. If you put a cooler on this and OC the 6300 you can make it last a good while.

Lol thats almost the same setup i came up with when i first got in to pc building.
yes i meant a gaming pc sorry for being so unspecific.
thank you for taking the time to put this together I will try some other setups and do some more research thx again.
do check out my parts list and tell me what you think........

I own 3 of the GPU models you described in the theoretical build above... that is a wise suggestion for gamers who don't demand the overkill cards, or if the gamer just wants to stay inside a certain budget. I can live without the ingame shadows and particles if it means saving a few bucks. That card will play most of the games out with very playable FPS, & if players buy at the right time... it also comes with free game coupons to get the budget/new gamers started. It works very well for single monitor 1080p applications. I have even CrossFired mine, which in terms of performance may be just as good as the low R9 cards, except with the 270X... gamers will enjoy TrueAudio without paying the price of the 290 or 290X.

It was a little weird, being the card is roughly the size of a 7770 or 650 Ti, but I was happy to not have to route another cable at the same time. I was pleasantly surprised at it's performance as well as OCing ability!

Hey Skemble, I have a quick question to ask. Do think that the 750 Ti SC could play get good FPS on medium for games like BF4, Titanfall, and more of the modern games? You already covered 2 games that I have played a lot of already!

I love extensions! They really make things pop! Check out ensourced.net for completely custom sleeves in any color/pattern you might need.

I'm not a big builder or anything. I live in a small town which of course doesn't help, but I'm content with the load of builds I have. It's been about one a month or so. Thanks for the like though, I really appreciate it!

PC building is really new to me and I want to build myself a gaming PC based on a budget of at least $800. So with your knowledge and expertise, what gaming PC can I build that will give me good fps playing Leauge of Legends, DAYz Standalone, and many other games?

Do you think this pc would be good enough for streaming League, a few other PC games, and CoD with a video card? http://pcpartpicker.com/p/Jm7kgs Trying to make as cost efficient as I can, so any help is appreciated

I have the 750 ti sc and mine has only 1 fan. I've seen the other graphics cards with the same exact name but there 2 fans on it. I'm really confused about this. Could someone possibly explain it to me

I love my 750 IT SC card also. I bought it about a year ago and haven't really used it fully until I purchased Cyberlinks PowerDirector14 Ultra. Using the hardware acceleration feature of the software my H.264 video rendering speed increased about 10x. Not bad for a $130 card and $100 software package.

I really like the Silverstone ones. The NZXT ones are nice, but they're rough and thin feeling, while the Silverstone ones are thicker and soft. In the first pictures it is set to white, all the knobs turned to the right.